In modern medical facilities patient related data are almost exclusively recorded and stored as electronic data files. The electronic health record (EHR) is one example.
The EHR includes images, lab reports, etc. and is kept in storage facilities that are interconnected in a network with a number of workstations.
Medical practitioners use the workstations to access and to retrieve patient related data for research or for the purposes of diagnosis.
Advances in the medical field led to the development of dedicated medical imaging equipment also known as modalities. Examples are computer tomographs (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) modalities. The modalities allow the acquisition of highly specific images for the purposes of diagnoses of specific diseases.
The modalities allow the medical practitioner acquiring images tailored for the purposes of diagnosing a specific disease.
In order to diagnose another disease further images with possible different parameter settings on the same modality must be taken or one resorts to another modality altogether.
Thanks to modern medical research it is possible for people nowadays to live much longer than they did in the past. However, this comes at the expense that people contract a number of different diseases during their long lives.
Most of the diseases afflicting the elderly are chronic is diseases.
The combined effect of the large number of different diseases per person and the large number of different images acquired for diagnosing each of the different disease results in an exponential growth of medical image data in the storage facilities. Disease-targeted retrieval and interpretation thereof becomes a daunting task.
Moreover, advances in medical research also generate an ever growing stream of new medical knowledge disseminated for example through medical journals. This knowledge leads to equally constant up- or outdating of medical guidelines.
Therefore it becomes more and more difficult for the medical practitioner to interpret and to evaluate the vast number of available patient related information against the constantly updated medical knowledge in the guidelines. This difficulty undermines the efficiency of the diagnostic work.
Accordingly there is a need for an improved and time-efficient method for making available patient related medical information and taking at the same time into account the constantly updated stream medical knowledge in the medical guidelines.